Sex as a Second Language

by Alisa Kwitney

  “I think it was a brilliant idea. All my students have been asking if we can leave the classroom, too.” In the background, Kat heard the sound of a man’s voice in the background, sounding faintly irritable. “Just two more minutes, Steve, I’m almost done. Kat, I think I need to go. Steve needs to get on the internet and we still have the old system.”

  “Sure,” said Kat, thinking, What Steve needs is a hard kick up the ass, preferably administered by Marcy. But Marcy seemed incapable of making a stand, no matter how badly Steve behaved. Which made Kat wonder: Was there anything her friend would not tolerate?

  And suddenly Kat thought of something that made her stomach contract. “Listen, I have one question I need to ask you.” Kat took a quick gulp of her wine to brace herself. “It’s about Zandra and Logan. Did you know she was sleeping with him?”

  “What?” Marcy’s voice had risen to an indignant screech. “You’re joking.”

  Kat felt her muscles relax. “Oh, thank God. I had this awful thought that maybe you knew and felt you couldn’t tell me.”

  “How could you think that?”

  “Because I know you don’t like to take sides, and this is a take-sides kind of deal.”

  “I still can’t believe it. Are you sure?”

  “I saw them together and she admitted it. Turns out Logan was the semi-famous man.”

  There was an audible click, the sound of someone picking up another line.

  “Steve? Is that you? I’m still on the phone.” There was no response. “Steve? Honey, I’m just finishing up, but this is important.”

  “That’s all right,” said Kat, thinking, Jesus, this guy is even creepier than I thought. “I just wanted to know whether or not Zandra had told you.”

  “No,” said Marcy, “I swear to God, Kat, I had no idea.” There was another click, presumably Steve hanging up. Kat heard the sound of his voice again, this time a little louder and more impatient. She caught the words “endless, pointless gossip” and “priorities.”

  “This is not gossip, Steve, and I need two more minutes!”

  “I’ll let you go now.”

  “I’m sorry, Kat.” Marcy sighed. “He has a bad cold and it always turns him into such a bear.”

  That, thought Kat, is an insult to bears everywhere, even the ones that eat camera-wielding tourists. On the other line, Kat heard an angry shout, then a clanking sound. “Steve, get your hand away from this phone. If you dare hang it up…” There was the sound of the phone banging against something.

  “Did something break? Marcy, is everything okay?”

  But it seemed that Marcy had dropped the phone. Kat caught the words “Immature, I’ve had it” and “You care more about your goddamn girlfriends than you do about me.”

  “Marcy? Marcy? Are you all right?” She’d never heard her friend lose her temper before.

  “Hi, I’m fine, but I’m going to have to call you back in the morning.”

  The phone went dead in Kat’s hand. Throwing back her head, Kat finished her wine. Maybe being single wasn’t so bad, after all.

  After a moment, she picked up the Teacher’s College course catalog, but after three tries at reading the requirements for Reading Specialists, Kat accepted the fact that she was unable to focus. Despite the wine she’d drunk, she felt as though she’d just come off a three-day caffeine binge. Too many highs and lows, thought Kat, and way, way, way too much tension. She looked at the remaining half a bottle of Vermentino and decided that the last thing she needed was to wake up with a hangover.

  Kat dialed her mother’s number.

  “Mom? I don’t suppose you have any Valium?” Like many women of her generation, Lia had her own unofficial dispensing pharmacy in her bathroom.

  “Come on over to my back door.”

  Standing just inside her back door, Lia whispered, “This isn’t Valium, but it’ll relax you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A sleeping pill.”

  Kat handed the pill back. “I can’t, I’ve already had a glass of wine.”

  “One glass won’t hurt if you eat something. It’s extremely mild.”

  Kat looked at the pill. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right, thanks. I just feel so overexhausted that I don’t think I can sleep.”

  Lia brushed a lock of hair away from Kat’s face. “It’s been quite a day for you. But you know, just because some people don’t live up to your expectations doesn’t mean that no one will. Some people surprise you by surpassing your expectations.”

  Kat said good night and walked back across the hallway to follow her mother’s advice. She was just getting herself a late-night snack of Cap’n Crunch when the doorbell rang.

  Kat opened the door. “Mom?”

  Magnus cleared his throat. “Hello, Katherine.” He looked tall and grave and ridiculously handsome in a Scandinavian sweater that made his eyes look very blue. “I would have come by earlier, but I had some important business to take care of.”

  “Pedro didn’t ring you up on the house phone.”

  “He probably thinks I still live here.”

  For some reason, Kat found she couldn’t stop staring at the pattern on Magnus’s sweater. She reached out a hand and touched one of the little blue knots, then found her hand splayed over his heart. “Nice sweater,” she said.

  “Kat? Did you hear anything I just told you?”

  “What?” Kat looked up into Magnus’s concerned face. “Tell me again.” She stumbled a little, and Magnus caught her by the elbow. “Are you all right?”

  “Just tired.” She let herself sag against him, and he felt wonderful, strong and supportive. The wool was a little scratchy, though. “Can you take this off?” She tugged at the sweater.

  “Kat, are you drunk?”

  “No, I just had one glass of wine.” Kat closed her eyes and felt pleasantly dizzy. She remembered being a kid and lying back in the middle of the merry-go-round and watching the trees spin. Magnus’s arms came around her.

  “Are you all right? You seem kind of loopy.”

  “I took a pill.”

  He stiffened. “How many?”

  Kat opened her eyes. “One, you idiot. I’m not committing suicide.”

  “Oh.” Magnus didn’t remove his arms. “But you said you also had wine?”

  “Just one glass, but it was ages ago.” Kat thought about it. “Of course, I haven’t eaten much today.” No, wait—she’d forgotten her little post-Logan binge. The whole day was beginning to blur around the edges.

  Magnus held her for a moment, his mouth pressed to the top of her head. “ Katherine, I want you to know, I came here to apologize. And I wanted to tell you that I’m leaving the Agency. I just…I didn’t like the kind of choices I had to make.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pulled away enough to look her in the eye. “I don’t want to be opportunistic about my emotions.”

  Kat thought about it, then made up her mind. She closed her eyes and gave him a hug. “You’re a good man, Magnus.”

  Kat sat up in bed and blinked. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing she could recall was standing in the entryway with Magnus. What time was it, anyway? The room was dark, but she could make out a shadowy form sitting in the corner, and she could feel a gentle, familiar presence. “Magnus? Are you still here?”

  The mattress dipped as he sat down. “I’m here. I’m watching you.”

  Kat pushed her hair away from her face. “You are? What for?”

  “You seemed a little out of it. You started talking about someone stealing the prize out of the cereal box, and I got worried.”

  “Oh.” She noticed that he’d taken off his sweater and was wearing a white T-shirt. She looked at his neck, and thought about kissing it. “I feel fine now. Just a little cold.”

  Magnus put one hand on her arm. “Do you want a warmer nightgown?”

  Kat leaned into him, inhaling his cl
ean male scent. “Just hold me for a second.”

  “I don’t think I should.”

  Kat blinked. She must have missed something. She seemed to be topless, lying in Magnus’s arms. He was naked from the waist up, too. She ran her hands over the flat muscles of his chest, feeling warm and drowsy and aroused. “What?”

  “I said I don’t think I should take off my jeans.”

  Kat slid her hands around his shoulders. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re under the influence of a drug, and you might not really want to do what you’re doing.”

  “Actually, I think the pill’s worn off.” Kat pressed her body alongside the length of his, thinking how good it felt to be in his arms like this, and how nice it was that he was so concerned about her.

  “I don’t think it has worn off.”

  Kat licked his ear. “Test me.”

  Magnus tried to hold her at arm’s length. “All right, who am I and why are you mad at me?”

  “You’re a secret agent, and I’m not mad anymore.”

  Magnus cupped Kat’s face in his hands. “Actually, I’m not an agent anymore.”

  Tired of the conversation, Kat pulled his mouth down onto hers. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d kissed a man like this, as if there were all the time in the world. She loved kissing him. She would be perfectly content to do this all night.

  Magnus was naked, his arms braced on either side of her shoulders, his face inches from hers. His expression was indescribably tender, but there was also something fierce in it. She could feel him between her legs, at the entrance to her body. Kat wasn’t sure how they’d gotten here from kissing with his jeans on, but she wasn’t complaining. In fact, she thought she might pass out if he didn’t hurry up.

  “Oh, God, Katherine, I love you.”

  “You do?” He pushed himself inside her, and it felt uncanny, as if they really had become one being. She couldn’t ever recall sex being like this. She felt the intensity of Magnus’s emotions in the touch of his hand on the small of her back, in his shuddering breath, in the way his warm, naked skin felt wherever it came into contact with hers. It was a little overwhelming. Magnus was barely moving, and the pleasure was already almost more than she could bear.

  His breath was coming in ragged gasps, and then she was ambushed by a sensation that swept from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. Wrapping her legs around him, she pressed little kisses to his neck and shoulder and face. “Tell me again.”

  He smiled. “I love you.”

  “Tell me in Icelandic.”

  He caressed her cheek. “You tell me first.”

  Kat closed her eyes. “I don’t know Icelandic.”

  She smiled as she felt his chest rumble with laughter.

  chapter thirty-eight

  i n the morning, Kat opened her eyes and discovered that there was a man in her bed. She gasped, and Magnus opened his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Magnus gave her a slow, sleepy smile. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like you to explain why we’re both naked.”

  “Because it seemed a little too early in the relationship for leather?”

  Kat hit him, and Magnus blinked. “You’re not joking, are you?” He looked stricken. “You don’t remember?”

  Kat pulled away from him. God, the whole bed smelled like sex. “How did you get into my apartment?”

  There was a knock on the door. “Mom? Why is your door locked?”

  “One minute, honey.” Kat scrambled out of bed, bringing the sheet with her. “Do not show your face to my son. I don’t want him getting confused. And you’d better have a good explanation for this.”

  Kat gave herself a quick wash in the bathroom before throwing on an old pair of black yoga pants and a long-sleeved pink T-shirt. For some reason, she was wearing the Viking charm again. Too rushed to take it off, Kat scraped her hair back into a ponytail, unlocked her door, and slipped out before Dashiell could come inside. “Did you have a good night at Nana’s, honey?” Kat smiled, trying not to look like a woman who’d just lost an evening.

  “Yeah, but now she says she has to go to work. And I don’t have to go to school, remember?”

  Oh, crap. All her decisions seemed a little more complicated this morning than they had last night. Kat walked Dashiell back across the hall. “Mom, could you please hang on to Dash for a little while longer? It’s an emergency.”

  Lia frowned. “I have to get into work this morning. What’s going on?”

  Kat glanced down at Dashiell and tried to think of a way to convey the nature of her dilemma. “It’s a little hard to explain right now. But it’s important.”

  Lia looked skeptical. “All right, I’ll reschedule my day so that I can watch Dash for another hour. That will have to be enough, and I can’t do this all the time.”

  Kat hugged her mother in gratitude and raced back to her apartment, where she picked up the house phone.

  “Pedro, did you send a man up to my apartment last night without calling me?”

  “You say send tall blond man up, no checking. I listen.”

  At that moment, Magnus wandered into the kitchen. Kat narrowed her eyes at him, radiating hostility as she spoke into the phone. “Well, he is no longer residing here. Next time, call me before sending anyone up.”

  “If I remember. You change your mind so much.”

  Kat hung up and turned to Magnus, who was sitting on a stool and looking pale and resolute. “Well? What have you got to say for yourself?”

  Magnus took a moment to respond. “I don’t know how much of last night you remember.”

  “I don’t even recall you coming over! What did you do, take advantage of me in my sleep?” She didn’t really think that he would do something like that, but Kat had been more than a little disconcerted to wake up next to Magnus. Having him here was like smoking a cigarette after you thought you’d quit the habit. Suddenly, all the healthy reasons for throwing this man out seemed less important than the desire to touch him again.

  “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t want to make love to you.”

  Kat folded her arms over her chest. “Oh, no? What happened then—did I force myself on you?”

  Magnus frowned. “You’d taken a pill. I was trying to take care of you.” His eyes looked very blue, entreating her. “Please tell me you remember something about last night.”

  Belatedly, Kat realized that the sleeping pill must have affected her short-term memory. Last time I do that. “What am I supposed to remember?”

  Magnus indicated an empty stool. “Sit down.” He inhaled deeply, and Kat leaned forward, waiting to hear what he had to say. Except he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just frowned, as if searching for the right words.

  “Well? Well? What is it? If it’s bad news, just tell me.”

  “Right before we got on the plane yesterday, your father had what we thought was a heart attack.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “But it wasn’t his heart. It turned out to be arrhythmia brought on by an acute anxiety attack.”

  “So he’s all right?” She felt curiously blank, as if she were doing a cold read of a scene, and hadn’t gotten a handle on her character yet.

  Magnus hesitated. “He’s not in any imminent danger. But he is in the hospital. The doctors discovered that some of the arteries leading to his heart are partially occluded. I think he may need some surgery.”

  “Oh.” She met Magnus’s steady, compassionate gaze. “But he’s not dying?”

  “No.” Magnus watched her face. “He asked for you, you know. He very much wants to see you.”

  “He does?”

  “I think he’s scared.”

  Kat thought about that. She didn’t owe him anything—God knows, he’d never been there for her when she’d been scared throughout her childhood. And yet the thought of him lying alone and frightened in a hospital room was deeply disturbing. “Is there someone
with him now?”

  “We have an agent there keeping him company.”

  “That’s good.” Kat wasn’t sure whether or not she was having a delayed reaction. She felt relief at knowing her father wasn’t about to die, but that was about it. And maybe that was the saddest thing of all, that her father had given her no reason to care. “I guess I must seem kind of cold.”

  Magnus shook his head. “I don’t think you’re cold.” Was he implying that her father was the one who was cold, or did he mean something else? She was half-afraid to ask, in case he was about to launch into one of those classic male speeches that went, If I were capable of being in a relationship with anyone, it would be you, but I’m not.

  Had she said something to him last night that had implied she wanted a relationship? Oh, Christ, had she told him she was still in love with him?

  Magnus swallowed hard, and Kat realized he was nervous. “I want you to know that I left my job.”

  Kat felt her heart speed up. This wasn’t how the brush-off speech usually began. “You did? Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want to turn into the kind of man you couldn’t trust.” Magnus shook his head as if that was beside the point. “No. That’s not right. I didn’t want to turn into a person I couldn’t trust.”

  Kat stood up. “What else did I forget?”

  “Making love? You remember that, don’t you? It was the most incredible…” Magnus searched her face. “You don’t recall any of it?” He raked his hand through his hair. “Aw, shit.”

  He looked so utterly forlorn that Kat felt sorry for him. He was absolutely the least articulate man she’d ever been with, and she knew that if she wanted to hear everything he felt summed up in an eloquent speech, then she would be endlessly disappointed. But she also knew, standing there in her kitchen, that however badly he expressed himself, she could believe what he said.